MISSOULA DOWNTOWN HERITAGE INTERPRETIVE PLAN JANUARY 2020 Prepared for the Missoula In collaboration with the City of Missoula Historic Preservation Office and Downtown Foundation Downtown Missoula Partnership. Supported by a grant from the Montana by Historical Research Department of Commerce Associates, Inc. We acknowledge that we are in the homelands of the Salish and Kalispel people. We offer our respect for their history and culture, and for the path they have always shown us in caring for this place for the generations to come. The confluence of Rattlesnake Creek and the Clark Fork. In Salish it is known asNł ay (or in long form, Nł a y c cˇ s t m ), meaning Place of Small Bull Trout. This place-name is used by Salish speakers to refer to the city of Missoula as a whole. In the background is the mountain known in Salish as Es Moq˙ w, meaning It’s a Mountain—akin to New Yorkers referring to their hometown simply as “the City.” Credit: Séliš-Ql’ispé Culture Committee TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION . 5 PART 1: FOUNDATION . 15 Purpose and Guiding Principles . 16 Interpretive Goals . 17 Themes . 17 Interpretive Theme Matrices . 21 Setting and Audiences . 25 Issues and Influences Affecting Interpretation . 27 PART 2: EXISTING CONDITIONS . 28 Interpretation in Downtown Missoula . 29 Information and Orientation . 30 Audience Experience . 31 Programming . 33 Potential Partners . 33 PART 3: RECOMMENDATIONS . 41 Introduction . 42 Actions Related to the Connectivity of Downtown Interpretation . 43 Actions Related to Special Events . 45 Actions Related to the Missoula Downtown Master Plan . 45 Actions Related to Pre-Visit/Distance Interpretation . 47 Actions Related to Interpreting Many Perspectives and Underrepresented Heritage . 48 Actions Related to Audience Experience . 52 Actions Related to Program Administration . 55 Actions Related to Scholarship . 57 Actions Related to Additional Interpretative Elements . 57 Actions Related to Collaboration . 57 Actions Related to Educators and Youth Outreach . 59 Actions Related to General Outreach and Marketing . 60 Recommended Implementation Plan . 61 Summary . 75 PART 4: PLANNING RESOURCES . 76 HRA Project Team . 77 Interpretive Planning Advisory Committee . 77 Acknowledgments . 77 Definitions . 77 Select Interpretation Resources . 78 Select Topical Resources . 78 INTRODUCTION A portion of “Heart of Missoula” completed in 2005 by Hadley Ferguson. Credit: HRA Missoula Downtown Heritage | Interpretive Plan | January 2020 5 Missoula Textile is a Downtown Missoula heritage business, having been in operation for more than 100 years. Credit: HRA 6 HISTORICA L R ESEA RCH A SSOCIATES As the downtown cultural landscape evolves during this pivotal time, Missoula is presented with an opportunity to both embrace change and to celebrate the characteristics and values that make its downtown unique — its heritage. Downtown Missoula is undergoing a period of cultivates sociocultural ties to the community. unprecedented growth and redevelopment. A In the most fundamental sense, interpretive flurry of construction activity is bringing forth planning is about identifying the meaning exciting development in the form of new and behind natural and cultural resources and remodeled hotels, housing, businesses, shops, finding ways to communicate that meaning to restaurants, and even a library. The recently the public. Interpretive planning helps historic completed Downtown Master Plan presents a sites, museums, and heritage areas—like far-reaching vision for community design. As Downtown Missoula—consider ideas, make the downtown cultural landscape evolves during choices, and set priorities about interpretation this pivotal time, Missoula is presented with and educational programming. an opportunity to both embrace change and to celebrate the characteristics and values that The Missoula Downtown Heritage Interpretive make its downtown unique—its heritage. Plan is designed to guide downtown heritage interpretation by encouraging audiences Interpretive planning is an essential first to make meaningful connections to the step in preserving the heritage and distinct shared human experience represented there. characteristics of Downtown Missoula, It identifies interpretive goals and issues, particularly during times of growth and examines existing conditions, and provides master planning. Heritage interpretation is a recommendations to implement over a period major tenant of place-making and place-based of time. It also serves as an instructional tool planning. It fosters community investment, and Missoula Downtown Heritage | Interpretive Plan | January 2020 7 and source of inspiration for interpretive practitioners. More than anything, it presents Heritage is the tangible and the a vision for a comprehensive heritage program intangible, the natural and the that will shape the downtown experience cultural. This collective heritage and celebrate the distinct character of the reveals a deeper understanding community by tying together key natural and of where we have been and cultural resources into a cohesive network. where we are going. Overview Downtown Missoula is many things to many different people. It is part of the homelands of Missoula is its people. From time immemorial the Salish and upper Kalispel people, who lived this valley has been a central part of the here and continue to live here. It is a haven vast Salish and upper Kalispel territory that for artists and students. It is buildings made spanned the four directions on both sides of of local brick alongside marble and granite the Continental Divide. Other tribal peoples courthouses. It is a story of displacement, traversed the valley, including the Kootenai, growth, and perseverance. At the root of this lower Kalispel, Nez Perce, Spokane, Coeur place is Downtown Missoula’s heritage. d’Alene, and Blackfeet. We consider “heritage” to be the collective The Lewis and Clark Expedition passed fabric that defines and distinguishes Missoula. through this natural thoroughfare and many It is the spirit of place. It is how Missoula others followed. Transportation developments sounds, looks, smells, and feels. It is what makes led the United States to survey for a railroad Missoula, Missoula. Heritage is the tangible and here and negotiate the Hellgate Treaty with the intangible, the natural and the cultural. It the Salish, upper Kalispel, and Kootenai, who is both the Clark Fork River and the story of agreed to cede portions of their lands, including the people who lived beside it. It is memory the Missoula Valley, while reserving the right to and experience, art and song. This collective continue to hunt, fish, and gather plants there. heritage reveals a deeper understanding of Christopher P. Higgins and Francis Worden where we have been and where we are going. created the commercial foundation of the valley The wilderness surrounds Missoula. Downtown in 1860 when they established a trading post perches on the banks of the river and sits in the at Hell Gate--situated along the newly-built shadow of mountains. The valley walls bear the Mullan Road to serve the business of nearby rippled reminders of cataclysmic glacial floods. Indian agencies. When Higgins and Worden Fire shaped its forests, just as the rivers have moved their operation to the confluence of reshaped the valleys over centuries of geologic Rattlesnake Creek and the Clark Fork River, time. Missoula is the natural landscape. it was Higgins’ upper Kalispel wife, Julia, 8 HISTORICA L R ESEA RCH A SSOCIATES INTRODUCTION who is often credited with suggesting the new fishing and huckleberry picking in the summer. settlement take an anglicized version of its From the St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Salish place-name: Missoula. Church to Har Shalom to the St. Francis-Xavier Catholic Church, from the political activism of Missoula grew into an economic hub of Western Gals Against Smog Pollution (GASP) to anti- Montana while remaining a place of mixed war protests, Missoulians have a way of turning ways of life: the tribal ways that had defined their collective voices and shared experiences the region for millenia, and the nascent market into the foundations of their community. system, further spurred by the gold rushes of the 1860s. The Mullan Road brought people and Downtown is also a haven for the arts. From the commerce into the valley, but it was the steel Wilma to the Missoula Community Theater, spines of the Northern Pacific that ignited an from vaudeville to River City Roots Festival, explosion of industrial activity. A. B. Hammond’s the downtown streets have hosted artists of all lumber empire provided the bones for growth, calibers. The Blackfoot River inspired Norman and the mills at Bonner supplied not only Maclean to write A River Runs Through It, and Missoula, but Butte and other Montana towns. an affinity for the town brought the passage: Economic expansion benefited some, but “The world is full of bastards, the number increasing pushed tribal people and other racial and ethnic rapidly the further one gets from Missoula, Montana.” minorities to the margins. The development of Each year, filmmakers from around the world the Garden City involved extremes of the human arrive for the International Wildlife Film experience and everything in between, all rooted Festival and Big Sky Documentary Film in Downtown Missoula. Festival. Every month, Downtown hosts gallery Today, Downtown Missoula carries on traditions showings and gatherings on First Fridays. both old and new. The entrepreneurial